Beyond the Altar
Beyond the Altar

Author: Christine L.M. Gervais

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 177112296X

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Beyond the Altar illustrates how women religious overcome sexist subjugation by side-stepping the patriarchal power of the Roman Catholic Church. This book counters the stereotypical image of Catholic nuns as being loyally compliant with their church by showing how a number of current and former women religious in Canada challenge their institutional religion’s precepts and engage in transformative strategies to effect change both within and outside the Roman Catholic Church. The sisters’ testimonials reveal never-before-shared details about their painful experiences of male domination, their courageous efforts to move beyond such sexist stifling, and the women-led and women-centered spiritual, governance, and activist practices they have engendered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Featuring many examples of the sisters’ resourcefulness, resilience, and resistance, this book fills a void in international scholarship on what Canadian Catholic women religious have endured and accomplished. Through interviews and in-depth accounts of the complexities and nuances present in the current and former sisters’ lives, readers will discover their steadfast indomitability as they strategically, and sometimes subversively, innovate their spiritual spaces.

Blood on the Altar
Blood on the Altar

Author: Tobias Jones

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2012-02-28

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0571274951

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One Sunday morning in 1993 a 16-year-old girl named Eliza Claps goes missing from a church in the centre of Potenza, Italy. Shortly before her disappearance, Elisa had met Danilo Restivo, a strange local boy with a fetish for cutting women's hair on the back of buses. Elisa's family are convinced that Resitvo is responsible for their daughter's disappearance, but he is protected by local big-wigs: by his Sicilian father, by a doctor with links to organised crime, by a priest who had vices of his own. Years went by and Elisa's family could find only false leads. 2002, and Restivo is now living in Bournemouth. In November that year, his neighbour is found murdered, with strands of her own hair in her hands. Once again the police are at a loss to pin anything on him. It's not until 2010, when Elisa's decomposed body is found in the church where she went missing, that the two cases are linked and Restivo is finally dealt with. Blood on the Altar combines a gripping true crime case with Jones's deep understanding of Italian culture - the impunity it offers to the powerful - he so expertly demonstrated in his bestseller: The Dark Heart of Italy.

Idols Behind Altars
Idols Behind Altars

Author: Anita Brenner

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-10-23

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0486145751

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Critical study ranges from pre-Columbian times through the 20th century to explore Mexico's intrinsic association between art and religion; the role of iconography in Mexican art; and the return to native values. Unabridged reprint of the classic 1929 edition. 118 black-and-white illustrations.

An Altar in the World
An Altar in the World

Author: Barbara Brown Taylor

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-06

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0061971294

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In the New York Times bestseller An Altar in the World, acclaimed author Barbara Brown Taylor continues her spiritual journey by building upon where she left off in Leaving Church. With the honesty of Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) and the spiritual depth of Anne Lamott (Grace, Eventually), Taylor shares how she learned to find God beyond the church walls by embracing the sacred as a natural part of everyday life. In An Altar in the World, Taylor shows us how to discover altars everywhere we go and in nearly everything we do as we learn to live with purpose, pay attention, slow down, and revere the world we live in. The eBook includes a special excerpt from Barbara Brown Taylor's Learning to Walk in the Dark.

Lamb at the Altar
Lamb at the Altar

Author: Deborah Hay

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 9780822314394

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"The intention of my work is to dislodge assumptions about the fixity of the three-dimensional body."--Deborah Hay Her movements are uncharacteristic, her words subversive, her dances unlike anything done before--and this is the story of how it all works. A founding member of the famed Judson Dance Theater and a past performer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Deborah Hay is well known for choreographing works using large groups of trained and untrained dancers whose surprising combinations test the limits of the art. Lamb at the Altar is Hay's account of a four-month seminar on movement and performance held in Austin, Texas, in 1991. There, forty-four trained and untrained dancers became the human laboratory for Hay's creation of the dance Lamb, lamb, lamb . . . , a work that she later distilled into an evening-length solo piece, Lamb at the Altar. In her book, in part a reflection on her life as a dancer and choreographer, Hay tells how this dance came to be. She includes a movement libretto (a prose dance score) and numerous photographs by Phyllis Liedeker documenting the dance's four-month emergence. In an original style that has marked her teaching and writing, Hay describes her thoughts as the dance progresses, commenting on the process and on the work itself, and ultimately creating a remarkable document on the movements--precise and mysterious, mental and physical--that go into the making of a dance. Having replaced traditional movement technique with a form she calls a performance meditation practice, Hay describes how dance is enlivened, as is each living moment, by the perception of dying and then involves a freeing of this perception from emotional, psychological, clinical, and cultural attitudes into movement. Lamb at the Altar tells the story of this process as specifically practiced in the creation of a single piece.

The Altar Boys
The Altar Boys

Author: Suzanne Smith

Publisher: HarperCollins Australia

Published: 2020-08-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1460711491

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Boys with everything to live for ... A community betrayed ... The whistle-blower priest who paid the ultimate price **Shortlisted for the 2020 Walkley Book Award** **Shortlisted for the 2021 NSW Premier's Community and Regional History Prize** ** Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Minister's Award** Glen Walsh and Steven Alward were childhood friends in their tight-knit working-class community in Newcastle, NSW. Both proud altar boys at the local Catholic church, they went on to attend the city's Catholic boys' high schools: Glen to Marist Brothers, Hamilton, and Steven to St Pius X. Both did well: Steven became a journalist; Glen a priest. But their lives came to be burdened by secrets kept and exposed. Glen discovered that another priest was sexually abusing boys and reported the offender to police, breaking his vows to the Catholic 'brotherhood' in the process. His decision to give evidence regarding the cover-up of clerical abuse at a landmark trial ended in tragedy. Meanwhile, Steven was fighting his own battle to overcome a traumatic past, a battle that also ended in tragedy. Ensuing investigations revealed that at least 60 men in the region had taken their own lives. What had happened, and why were so many of those men from the three Catholic high schools in the area? By six-time Walkley Award-winning investigative reporter Suzanne Smith and shortlisted for the 2020 Walkley Book Award, The Altar Boys is the explosive expose of widespread and organised clerical abuse of children in one Australian city, and how the cover-up in the Catholic Church in Australia extended from parish priests to every echelon of the organisation. Focusing on two childhood friends, their families and community, this gripping story is backed by secret documents, diary notes and witness accounts, and details a deliberate church strategy of using psychological warfare against witnesses in key trials involving paedophile priests.

At the Altar
At the Altar

Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13:

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Stern parents, awkward circumstances, misunderstandings, lovers’ quarrels – and one very determined cat – are some of the many hindrances that Montgomery’s characters find themselves battling on the way to the altar. But Montgomery helps her lovers overcome these obstacles to true love by a wonderful assortment of means: maiden aunts come to the rescue; two pairs of twins play major roles; a marauding pig is an unusual cupid; the lovers themselves come up with striking solutions. Whatever storms they must weather on the sea of love, whether they are rich or poor, young or old, trembling with romance or properly practical, in Montgomery’s hands courting couples seem destined to live “happily ever after.” Funny, heartwarming, and full of romance, these eighteen stories are sure to delight Montgomery’s many fans. From the Hardcover edition.

Before the Altar
Before the Altar

Author: Luis Garcia

Publisher: WestBow Press

Published: 2013-02-07

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1449784089

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Biblical purity is not merely a line we are called not to cross; it is a lifestyle we are called to live. It is more than physical restraint. True purity involves our minds, motives, and actions. Culture says to follow your heart. Scripture says follow God. It is time we start living like Jesus followers in every area of our lives, sold out for His glory. Romance and love are no exception. Books written on the topics of romance, singleness, and purity are looking back, but I am looking forward. I have never dated or kissed, and Im eighteen. Most people my age have already dated, kissed, and lost their virginity; some have even experienced pregnancy. For young adults, divorce and cohabitation rates are beyond acceptable. Abortion numbers have amassed to over nine holocausts. And I am compelled to stand in the gap. If no one makes a stand, we can only expect even worse consequences to come. Its time to stop playing in the muck of this world and slapping a Christian label on it. We need to be resolute in surrendering our lives to the authorship of God. And that surrender starts nowbefore the altar.

The Other Side of the Altar
The Other Side of the Altar

Author: Paul E. Dinter

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2010-06-29

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1429984767

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In all the coverage of the priestly sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, one story has been left untold: the story of the everyday lives of Catholic priests in America, which remain so little understood as to be a secret, even as one priestly sexual predation after another has come to light. In The Other Side of the Altar, Paul Dinter tells one priest's story--his own--in such a way as to reveal the lives of a generation of priests that spanned two very different eras. These priests entered the ministry in the 1960s, when Catholic seminaries were full of young men inspired by both the Church's ancient faith and the Second Vatican Council's promises of renewal. But by the early 1970s, the priesthood--and the celibate fraternity it depended upon--proved quite different from what the Council had promised. American society had changed, too, particularly in the area of sexuality. As a result, there emerged a clerical subculture of denial and duplicity, which all but guaranteed that the sexual abuse of children by priests would be routinely covered up by the Church's bishops. Dinter, now married and raising two stepdaughters, left the priesthood in 1994 over the issue of celibacy, but not before having occasion to reflect on the whole range of priestly struggles with celibacy and sexual life in general--in Rome and rural England, on an Ivy League campus, and in parish rectories of the archdiocese of New York. His candid and affecting account--written from the other side of the altar, so to speak--makes clear that celibacy, sexuality, and power among the clergy have long been intertwined, and suggests how much must change if the Catholic Church hopes to regain the trust of its people.

Murder at the Altar
Murder at the Altar

Author: Terry Phillips

Publisher: Hye Books

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1892918021

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On Christmas Eve morning in 1933, the head of the Armenian Church in America, Archbishop Ghevont Tourian, is stabbed to death with a double-edged butcher knife as he begins Sunday services. His infamous murder in a little New York City church is witnessed by hundreds of parishioners - among them, a newspaper reporter named Tom Peterson. The next day, this story is splashed on the front page of every major daily in Manhattan. And no wonder. Not since the assassination of Thomas Becket has such a high religious leader been slain in a house of worship. This gruesome homicide shatters the Armenian community and confounds the cops. Was it a terrorist attack to silence a political adversary, a KGB plot to discredit anti-communists in America, or simply a tragic turn in an ancient, bitter dispute? Murder at the Altar is a work of historical fiction, although it might more accurately be called "dramatized history." The book interweaves past and present accounts of these complex events, alternating between "Now" and "Then" chapters which are written in first- and third-person voices respectively. Much of the text is based on interviews with survivors, court transcripts and newly declassified FBI files. There are also actual news clips as well as some previously unpublished photos available to further illustrate the story.